When God's Way Takes Too Long

Avoiding Short Cuts that Get You Lost

by Joseph Bentz

Do you want to lose lots of weight without having eat less or do any exercise? Do you want to make piles of money without really trying?

Of course you do!

The good news is there are plenty of schemes that offer quick weight loss and easy riches. My email inbox fills up with them every day. So do my television screen and the advertising sections of my magazines and newspapers.

The bad news is almost none of these schemes work. But that doesn't keep us from trying. Our generation, probably more than any other in history, is addicted to shortcuts. If there's a faster, easier, less painful way to get where we want to go, we'll take it.

The trouble is many of the most attractive shortcuts lead to disaster. Take wealth, for instance. If you don't want to achieve it the old-fashioned way—by hard work, investments, and savings—you could always try the shortcut of debt. As of April 2006, Americans owed $807 billion on credit cards, an average of $7,600 per household. What are the consequences? The Los Angeles Times reports, "For every two couples who have gotten divorced in recent years, three families have gone bankrupt."1

Social commentator Carl Honore believes our obsession with instant gratification leads to "the chronic frustration that bubbles just below the surface of modern life. Anyone or anything that slows us down, that stops us from getting exactly what we want when we want it, becomes the enemy." He cites examples like the company executive whose airplane had to circle for 20 minutes before landing. Like a spoiled child, he screamed at the flight attendant, "I want to land now! Now, now, now!"2

The "now, now, now" mentality extends into countless areas of contemporary life. Lotteries and other forms of gambling raise hopes for quick riches; illicit and ultimately disappointing sexual relationships are a common "solution” to impatience for healthy intimacy; drug abuse seems to provide relief from life's challenges; and the padded resume is a widespread attempt to speed up career advancement.

The terrible toll of these shortcuts is obvious. But what if you don't personally have problems with temptations like gambling or drugs—can this pervasive cultural mentality still affect you spiritually?

God's time is a different story altogether.

As a member of the shortcut generation, I consider 2 Peter 3:8 one of the scariest passages in Scripture: "With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.” In the midst of his terrible suffering, Job came to the same conclusion when he said to the Lord, "Have You eyes of flesh? Or do You see as a man sees? Are Your days as the days of a mortal, or Your years as man's years” (Job 10:4-5).

Why are these verses scary? They confirm that God may take a long time to work out His plans in our lives. Saturated as we are in the "now, now, now" mindset, we may draw wrong conclusions about His timing: Why is He so slow about working out His plan for me? Why are His methods so roundabout?

Some of us, having grown tired of waiting for God's answer or clear direction, may conclude that He isn't really paying attention and we need to take matters into our own hands. It's not that we want to rebel against Him and go the opposite way from where He's been leading; we just believe we can improve a little on His timing. If we can find a quicker way to get to where we want God to bring us, we reason, why shouldn't we take it? After all, God helps those who help themselves. Surely He won't mind if we take a little deviation from His plan. 

The fact is, He does mind. 

Shortcuts eventually become obstacles.

Scripture is filled with disastrous attempts to find a quicker way than the path God has chosen. Consider Exodus 32, where the people gather at the foot of the mountain, waiting for Moses to descend with a revelation from God. Then, something generations before them would have given anything to see appears before their eyes: the glory of the Lord, "like a consuming fire on the mountain top" (Exodus 24:17). It would seem this amazing sight alone would be enough to sustain their faith until their leader returned.

The problem is they had no idea how long he'd be gone. All they knew was that days turned into weeks, and there was no sign of their leader. They had only one assignment to fulfill, which sounds easy enough: Just sit there and wait for Moses to return. But waiting turns out to be harder than almost any command for action they could have been given. They got restless. They got bored. And scared. What if he never comes back? Doubts took over, and they made a terrible choice, asking Moses' brother Aaron to make them a golden calf—a tangible god—to worship.

It's easy to condemn the Israelites, but can't we relate? As we wait on God in our own lives, not aware that He's already acting, we get restless. We panic: What if I'm stuck here forever? We rashly decide, If God isn't going to work in my life and leave me here with this empty waiting, then I'll make something happen! I'll have fun, if nothing else. If holding out for meaning seems to be failing, we settle for cheap substitutes to fill the void: food, shopping, making money, wrong relationships.

We often pray for strength to accomplish challenging things or to handle stress when we have too much to do. But waiting can be as crucial as any action we've ever taken, and we should approach it as such—depending solely on God's strength to enable us to accomplish it.

Just because you can't see or understand what God is doing doesn't mean He's doing nothing.

We must learn that God is doing important work in our lives even when we see no concrete evidence of it. When Moses was making history on Mount Sinai, the Israelites knew only God's silence and jumped to the wrong conclusions. God has all eternity to work out His purposes, so we may not see instant results.

Here's the challenge: will we see the joy and privilege of being a part of His story, even when the full outcome may not be apparent right away—perhaps not even in our lifetime? Will we trust God to lead our lives His way?

The long and short of it is there's no substitute for delving into God's work and trusting Him for the outcome. If we want to know Him better, there's no three-step formula for developing a lifetime of prayer; no easy alternative to deep, careful study of the Bible; no quick detour around a commitment to serving others, even when we see no immediate fruit.

We may not be able to escape the shortcut mentality of our society, but we're not doomed to buy into it. When we accept rather than fight God's perfect timing, He offers us freedom from the tyranny of "now, now, now." We can start experiencing the richness of the life He offers more fully and deeply—right now.

1 Shira Boss, "Broke, Like the Joneses.”

2 Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness.

To purchase Joseph Bentz’ book, When God Takes Too Long: Learning to Thrive During Life’s Delays, visit our online bookstore.

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